First Paragraph:
The partisan changes that swept the South have been of
interest for scholars for the past five decades.1 However,
these changes have presented scholars with a puzzle.
Specifically, why had Republican dominance at the
presidential level (Black and Black, 1992) failed to
translate into greater GOP gains in elections below the
presidency? Although Republican strength at the
congressional, state and local level has grown since the
1960s, by the 1980s this growth had stalled, and the GOP
remained the clear minority party in the region (Black and
Black, 1987; Bullock, 1988; Canon, 1992; Glaser, 1996;
Stanley, 1988; Thielemann, 1992). Underlying the continuing
Democratic advantage was the fact that more southern whites
continued to hold Democratic rather than Republican Party
identifications, which Black and Black (1987) note was the
'principal impediment to Republican success in
nonpresidential elections' (p. 282)

First Paragraph in
Conclusion:The findings presented in this article demonstrate that
racial attitudes should not be dismissed as an explanation
for the gains in Republican Party identifications among
southern whites in the mid-1990s. While racial resentment
did not have an impact on party identifications prior to
1994, it did shape party identifications in 1994 and 2000.
One would hope to extend this model to future elections in
order to discern whether this relationship is maintained,
but the evidence is at least suggestive that 1994 was what
Carmines and Stimson (1989) might term a 'critical moment'
in the linkage between racial resentment and the
partisanship of southern whites